Chinese grey market sells Claude API access at 90% off by using stolen credentials, model substitution, and harvesting users' prompts and outputs for resale as AI training data — 'transfer stations' operate through proxy networks that harvest user data

Source: Tom’s Hardware

Overview

A grey‑market economy of API proxy services in China is reselling access to Anthropic’s Claude models at as little as 10 % of the official price, according to an investigation published Monday by Oxford China Policy Lab researcher Zilan Qian.

Proxy Networks (“Transfer Stations”)

• Operate openly on platforms such as GitHub, Taobao, and Telegram.
• Known in Chinese developer communities as “transfer stations.”
• Maintain rock‑bottom pricing through a combination of:
  1. Stolen credentials
  2. Model substitution
  3. Harvesting users’ prompts and outputs for resale as AI training data

Official Responses

• White House: In late April, the administration accused Chinese entities of running “industrial‑scale” distillation campaigns against U.S. frontier models, using tens of thousands of proxy accounts.
• Anthropic: In February, the company disclosed similar activity, identifying roughly 24,000 fraudulent accounts linked to Chinese labs—including DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax—that were used for copying, distillation, and training smaller models. See the full report here.